Toby Harnden was the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC, from 2006 to 2011. Click here for Toby's website. Follow him on Twitter here @tobyharnden and on Facebook here. He is the author of the bestselling book Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story Britain's War in Afghanistan.

Hillary Clinton

Full coverage of the US Elections 2008Why do politicians lie? No, scrub that. Let's be charitable why do politicians exaggerate? More precisely, why did Hillary Clinton say, more than once, that when she visited Tuzla in 1996 she remembered "landing under sniper fire" and that "there was no greeting ceremony, and we basically were told to run to our cars". She even added "now, that is what happened", in the same way that when someone prefaces a comment with the word "honestly" you know they're being dishonest.

Do Hillary and Chelsea really look like they're in danger?

On the back foot, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson had this to say today: "It is possible in the most recent instance in which she discussed this that she misspoke in regard to the exit from the plane, but there is no question if you look at contemporaneous accounts that she was going to a potential combat zone, that she was on the front lines." Possible she misspoke? Watch this video and see how this is an, er, generous interpretation:

So Hillary's earned four Pinocchios (maximum rating for a "whopper" of the non-hamburger variety) from the Washington Post for that one. There are reporters emerging from the woodwork all over the place to say that there was no sniper fire, there was a greeting ceremony and there was precious little danger.Â

What was she thinking? It's been obvious for months that she was grossly over-stating what happened. We knew she was accompanied by Sheryl Crow, the comedian Sinbad and a teenage Chelsea.

She knew that Sinbad was an Obama supporter. She knew that dozens of reporters were with her and that there was video footage. Yet she still went ahead and told bigger and bigger porkies.Â

Of course, pretty much all politicians exaggerate. Barack Obama doesn't come across too well out of this account in today's Washington Post that includes details of how he claimed credit for work in the Senate that he didn't do.Â I've already written a lot about Hillary's Northern Ireland claims. Frankly, it's completely unsustainable for her to say she was "instrumental" in bringing peace there.Â

But she's been able to marshal enough people to back up this convenient Irish fiction, though no one has come up with any specifics as to how she was able to achieve this without anyone noticing including, until recently, herself.Â

On Bosnia, she hasn't been able to do that because the facts proved she "misspoke", as Wolfson puts it.Â

I guess it's partly a sign that for the Clintons desperate times require desperate measures. But it will also make voters wonder how truthful her other claims of deep and meaningful foreign policy are. As Alex Massie says, sometimes with politicians it's the little things that tell you most about them.Â

For those interested, my C-SPAN appearance on Easter Sunday can be viewed here. It's generated a bit of blogosphere comment, including from Carole Borges here who said that a "conservative idiot" embarrassed "two very distinguished gentlemen" and D J Orejon here who was "bummed out" that we were subjected to "fifth-column hogwash".

I also received a string of emails. One asked me: "Are you really as geopolitically naive as several of your comments would suggest or are you, wittingly or unwittingly, employed to run rhetorical cover for these media masters of manufactured dissent?Â

Have you ever read or heard Michel Chossudovsky? Are you aware of Operation Mockingbird that was employed some 60-70 years ago by the CIA to begin reining in the media to their liking and political advantage?"

Another said that it was "too bad that the stereotype ignorant, hate-filled southerners phoned in with that barrage of nonsense" and another asked me whether if troops are withdrawn from Iraq and bloodshed ensues I would "minimize the coverage in order to protect the party you favor?"

Say what you like about Americans but there's an almost infinite variety of opinion here and no shortage of readiness to express it.Â